A pandemic is an outbreak of an infectious disease that spreads across a large region, a continent, or even the world. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a pandemic can start when three conditions have been met: the emergence of a disease new to the population, a disease that infects humans, causing serious illness, …
In 2008, Zimbabwe’s suffering people had a glimmer of hope to lighten the dark decades during which Robert Mugabe and his ruthless ZANU-PF henchmen had bankrupted their once-prosperous country. The Movement for Democratic Change won parliamentary and presidential elections and – though Mugabe rigged the latter and refused to go – opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai …
A parent’s worst nightmare came true for thousands of families in China in 2008 when they found out they had been innocently feeding their babies with contaminated milk powder. Reports of infants falling ill with urinary problems and kidney failure began to emerge in March, but it was six months – and after the Beijing …
The multinational company Trafigura did a nifty deal in 2006, buying a large amount of coker gasoline from Mexican oil giant Pemex. This waste by-product of oil refining contains concentrated silica and sulphur, but Trafigura intended to process the waste to extract saleable naphtha. Better still, the company cleverly came up with a scheme to …
In March 2006 six healthy men, all under the age of 40, signed up as volunteers in a drug trial that was being conducted at a research unit based at Northwick Park Hospital in northwest London. The drug being tested was TGN1412, an anti-inflammatory drug designed to treat conditions such as leukaemia, rheumatoid arthritis and …
Towards the end of 2002 reports began to emerge from China of a virulent and potentially fatal respiratory disease that was proving highly resistant to treatment. The Chinese authorities were slow to alert the world to what quickly became a major health crisis. The World Health Organization (WHO), by contrast, fearing a global pandemic, acted …